50 things that are being killed by the Internet

The Internet has been touted as one of the most useful tool for the last two decades, and has had a huge impact on our lives, but along with its benefits, the World Wide Web has also had some negative impacts on people.

While tasks that once took days can be completed in seconds, traditions and skills that emerged over centuries have become redundant.

The Telegraph has compiled a list of 50 things that are in the process of being killed off by the web and other tools of modern communication, from products and business models to life experiences and habits.

These things are:

1. The art of polite disagreement

2. Fear that you are the only person unmoved by a celebrity's death

3. Listening to an album all the way through

4. Sarah Palin

5. Punctuality

6. Ceefax/Teletext

7. Adolescent nerves at first porn purchase

8. Telephone directories

9. The myth of cat intelligence

10. Watches

11. Music stores

12. Letter writing/pen pals

13. Memory

14. Dead time

15. Photo albums and slide shows

16. Hoaxes and conspiracy theories

17. Watching television together

18. Authoritative reference works

19. The Innovations catalogue

20. Order forms in the back pages of books

21. Delayed knowledge of sporting results

22. Enforceable copyright

23. Reading telegrams at weddings

24. Dogging

25. Aren't they dead? Aren't they gay?

26. Holiday news ignorance

27. Knowing telephone numbers off by heart

28. Respect for doctors and other professionals

29. The mystery of foreign languages

30. Geographical knowledge

31. Privacy

32. Chuck Norris's reputation

33. Pencil cricket

34. Mainstream media

35. Concentration

36. Mr Alifi

37. Personal reinvention

38. Viktor Yanukovych

39. The insurance ring-round

40. Undiscovered artists

41. The usefulness of reference pages at the front of diaries

42. The nervous thrill of the reunion

43. Solitaire

44. Trust in Nigerian businessmen and princes

45. Prostitute calling cards/ kerb crawling

46. Staggered product/film releases

47. Footnotes

48. Grand National trips to the bookmaker

49. Fanzines

50. Your lunchbreak (ANI)

The evolution of blogging

'Do you blog?' was one of the most happening questions a couple of years back. You were considered cool if you had one, and still cooler if you had one in a regional language! What made blogs happening? The fact that you could connect with a number of people scattered all over the world who'd know you for your words took the online world by storm. But then, you may ask are all blogs written by anonymous people? No, they are not. From celebs to common people, from cooking recipes to politics and space, there are thousands who blog about a zillion things under the sun and beyond it.

In a span of less than 5 years, blogging has evolved from being an online journal to sharing your thoughts from anywhere at any time. You can fix templates, update them and even blog from your mobile phones. And this, in a way gave rise to micro-blogging, with Twitter being first on the scene. So what exactly does one do on Twitter, you may ask. Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters displayed on your account, visible on your friends' profiles, those that decide to 'follow' you. You can also tweet up links to your photos or videos. This is perhaps the quickest and chirpiest way to keep in touch with a lot of people.

But what happens if you are in a mood for writing more and not really as much as you would in a blog? Enter the concept of macro-blogging. This is a blogging concept that doesn't restrict your thoughts to 140 but doesn't let them go beyond 1400 characters. The most popular macro-blogging platform out there today is Woofer. But here's the catch - your macro-blog posts have to be exactly 1400 characters long. Talk about precision.

And that's not all - there's nano-blogging (less than 14 characters) and meso-blogging (lies somewhere between macro and micro-blogging, though we really can't comment on what multiple of 14 it is) as well. For the poetically inclined, there's Haiku blogging, via Japan's nano-blogging platform, Chuitter. And if words are not your chosen mode of communication, you can choose to spread your message via photo blogs or even video blogs.

We're waiting with bated breath to see what form blogs will take next.